Blog | Words About Art | Maria Porges (2024)

I.

My trajectory has been one of mending. By mending myself, I mend others. Looking at my history in a positive way calms me, and I can bring that to others. How do I mend my pain, my history? That’s work that most people don’t want to do. They would rather do anything else… --Ramekon O’Arwisters

After many months of thinking about repair in all its forms: actual and metaphorical; hidden and visible; social, artistic and psychological—the world has changed around me, both suddenly and gradually, in ways that seem both irreversible and incomprehensible. Trying to make sense of it all has meant circling back to the same questions with which this project first began. Who is mending for? Is it for the mender, for the recipient -- if that person is someone other than the mender—or for society as a whole? How important is the mender’s intention, even if that is kept a secret? How much do we need to know to understand what is being fixed, and what the nature of that mending really is? And, above all: I find myself asking, is mending important now?

When I first encountered Ramekon O’Arwister’s work, I was thinking about many of these questions—in part, because of the complicated and multidimensional nature of his practice. He is widely known in the Bay Area for bringing groups of people together in shared creative activity. Increasingly, however, it has been his mesmerizing, idiosyncratic textile and ceramic sculpture that has been getting attention. Both kinds of work involve not only physical mending practices, but spiritual and psychological repair as well.

She already had a pattern; she’d been working on the quilt for months. But she was speaking to me in a symbolic way—the depth of her ability to do that was enormous. She couldn’t control what was going on outside of the house--- the racism, the hom*ophobia—but she could help me calm down, to feel accepted and embraced and then go out and find positive solutions.[1]”

O’Arwisters’ parents worked in the textile mills, doing jobs that have now gone overseas. The family lived on a farm, raising some of their food, and he remembers both of his parents taking what they had and recycling/ reusing it creatively. “My father would say, ‘we aren’t going to go buy a new product at the store. We’re going to use what we have and repurpose it. We will improvise.’ To do this, you have to be in tune enough with your environment, see the links, be in the in between of things.”

Clearly, O’Arwisters’ education in the traditions and practices of Black culture was extraordinarily rich, but he didn’t have an opportunity to study art in school. College culminated in a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology. Then, a few years later, he completed a Masters of Divinity , which usually leads to a career in the ministry. But art was always a part of his life; as a child, he had spent many hours sitting at the kitchen table, drawing and painting. “My parents knew that if I was drawing at the table, I’d be okay. I was at home, I wasn’t running in the streets, confronting the police, being destructive to myself or others.” Still, such an activity wasn’t considered to be work that someone could do for a living.

When he started in the master’s program at Duke University, O’Arwisters thought he wanted to be a preacher, or a pastoral counselor. “But I didn’t feel authentic in the church. I wasn’t ‘out’-- and the church wasn’t embracing gayness. How authentic could I be under those circ*mstances?” After graduate school, he spent five years in Japan, figuring out what came next. He taught English and, in his apartment, made colorful abstract drawings, showing and selling them in a Tokyo gallery.

When he returned to the United States, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked in various curatorial posts, eventually serving as the photography and video curator for the city’s airport. He was also making paintings, but “there wasn’t much happening with my art career.” Galleries weren’t interested. “I thought, there could be many factors here that are out of my control… I could be angry, but anger is not redemptive unless you can learn something from it.

“I thought, what am I angry about? I realized that I wanted a community, I wanted to be embraced, to be heard, to be accepted there on my own terms. So -- instead of asking other people to give me that, why not dig deep inside myself and cultivate those attributes inside of myself, give those things to others, through the folk art tradition my grandma had taught me? Instead of me wanting other people to accept me and my art, why not use the folk art tradition that my grandmother had helped me to experience—a tradition that had always been there in my life, but until I took the time to step back and reflect, I couldn’t see?”

But the kind of craft O’Arwisters had learned from his grandmother was needlework. That unfortunately made it inappropriate for a group activity-- since needles, after all, are sharp and tiny, and sewing is a skill that takes some time to master. O’Arwisters described to me the lightbulb moment when he realized that there was a practice he could share with others. “I showed my work to one of my friends, and she said, ‘you’re braiding fabric and sewing the braids together to make rag rugs, but you can do this with crocheting.’ That was the answer. I designed some bigger crochet hooks… and that allowed me to take it to another level--to use fabric, in a context that was healing.”

Fabric, he has pointed out, is something with which we all have an intimate and constant relationship, from the moment we are born. It is familiar and comforting, talismanic and protective. Everyone knows it and feels comfortable with it—unlike fine art materials, which can be intimidating. “I’m asking participants to look at making differently—to make without a label, to allow themselves to just experience it. I ask them to just accept what they are doing. Just to do it, not define it. I don’t want to be defined myself—politically, sexually, racially. We are more than our labels. I don’t expect the participants to go that far, but I want them to just choose their fabric and interact with it. I don’t give them instructions. I let go of my authority and allow them to maintain their agency.”

At the same time that hundreds of participants have ‘jammed’ with him all over the US, O’Arwisters gave himself the same kind of permission and encouragement, developing a new way of making sculpture. It started when he was doing a residency at Recology— the San Francisco dump— in the fall of 2016[2]. During the initial weeks, he went into a frenzy of collecting, picking through the astonishing wealth of material brought back to the transfer station by the city’s garbage trucks. The discards he found included everything from tires and hubcaps to typewriters, bathtubs, and old medical textbooks, and he filled his studio.

After three months of this, Deborah Munk, the director of the residency program, walked into his space and remarked that it looked more like a yard sale than art. She reminded him that visitors would be coming to see his work in a month, and asked him what his concept was. “I went into panic mode,” he recalled, “because she was right-- a month isn’t a long time to organize a show that is going to get a lot of attention, which these residency shows usually do. So I decided to reflect, step back and see how I was feeling on the inside.

“This was 2016, remember—the election had taken place during those months. I felt broken, detached, thrown away, sharp—so I took these emotions and feelings, accepted them, and thought, OK—instead of just looking at this as an opportunity to accumulate, I’m going to look at it as a way of reflecting these emotions. Whatever I’m feeling, I thought, maybe others are too.”

O’Arwisters put on the safety suit artists are required to wear in the delivery area and stepped into the space. “At first I saw the usual stuff I wanted to drag to my studio. I thought, this isn’t really working… Until suddenly I heard a crashing sound, four or five bins down from where I was standing. So I walked over there and I was staring at broken ceramics.

“Someone had cleared out their family heirlooms, or they just wanted to get rid of some stuff—plates, bowls, teacups—and I’m just standing there, looking at these broken, sharp things—and I’m misty-eyed. And I thought, ‘Ohhhh… I need medication… counseling… something.” O’Arwisters smiled when he told me this part of the story, but it was clear that he was serious at the same time. “Then I thought, If I’m looking at shards and I’m emotional, it must be something in the unconscious I’m dealing with. They’re broken. And that’s how I feel.’ So I picked them up and brought them back to my studio, and I started making work.”

In these tabletop sculptures and wall pieces, fragments of mundane, every-day ceramics—some small, and others quite large-- are cradled and contained by eccentric crocheted forms. The ropy coils of cloth wind around the sharp, broken bits like shapely bandages, inside of which the lip of a cup or rim of a bowl can be seen. It’s a kind of aid that holds a hurt without trying to conceal it. Not completely, anyway. Mending #21 brings to mind the way a tree grows around a fencepost or sign, engulfing it in living wood: a process called inosculation. The word suggests an enveloping kiss.

The fabric forms are composed of a wild variety of colors and textures. (He originally bought old clothes, linens and yard goods at thrift stores, but now, people give him bags of these materials. A stockpile of fabric is constantly being used and replenished during the ‘Jams.’) The shapes of many works invoke vessels, but some are more abstract. In Mending # 19, for instance, crocheted curves and circles envelop a tall, narrow vase, like vines overgrowing a neglected monument. And each work changes radically when viewed from different sides. In Mending #16, the swags of material wound around a broken bowl alternately reveal and conceal the ceramic form, almost coquettishly.

Talking about his choice of materials, O’Arwisters told me that it had to do with both past and present. “I needed to accept my journey as an artist—my journey, not a Western European journey, involving painting on canvas, or working with marble in a specific fine art tradition—those things don’t speak to my experience. It’s like me trying to put myself in a context that doesn’t reflect the authenticity of my world. My grandmother, my mother—they both reflected their joy or pain through fabric.”

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II.

Everyone has a primal connection to shards. It’s different from broken glass-- a different emotional connection. --RO

Like cloth, pottery goes back to almost the beginning of human culture[3], and has been part of the domestic landscape of nearly all peoples. Sometimes more than once, civilizations all over the world figured out how transform mud into something permanent. At least, until it breaks.

In O’Arwisters’ work since early 2019, both textiles and ceramics are still present, but their roles and behavior have changed in subtle yet important ways. Gradually, he has moved from using one or two shards in each sculpture to incorporating as many as he can. These are no longer the shattered remains of domestic pottery, though, but come instead from a collaboration with the ceramics department at California State University, Long Beach. The faculty, staff and students of this well-known program make ambitious, eccentrically- glazed sculpture and one-of-a-kind tableware. Sometimes pieces have mishaps, blowing up or breaking in the kiln, and end up in the department’s ‘shard yard.’ From pictures of these interesting failures, O’Arwisters chooses the ones he wants, paying for them to be packed and shipped to him.

O’Arwisters chose the title Cheesecake because he means this body of work to be provocative and sensual—but slightly disturbing, almost threatening, as well. For him, this dichotomous combination encapsulates the way he feels about being a queer black man. Historically, he reminded me, black men are perceived as dangerous[5]. He remembers being raised to be passive and submissive. “You never looked white people in the eye. Even now, I wouldn’t make eye contact with the police… How do I make my work reflect my experience? How can the materials I use be subversive, sensual, powerful and restorative, all at the same time?”

The cloth in these works is different too, both in its deployment and presence, and in that it new instead of recycled. O’Arwisters is using fashion fabrics he buys online from a store that specializes in designer material[6]. While not necessarily more vivid, these offer a dizzying variety of textures and weaves. In addition, he has started plaiting the cloth as well as crocheting it. (Braiding was a daily ritual in his childhood home, as it is in many African American households; a number of Black artists have made potent and compelling work about and with hair[7].)

In several works, skeins of loose threads and what look like tassels hang and drape, sometimes cascading over the sharp edge of a glazed fragment. Many of these suggest the possibility of a figure, costumed in some kind of ceremonial regalia.

Cheesecake #10, in contrast, looks more like a ceremonial weapon, the cylindrical void at its center ready to receive a pole or spike.

Can something that inspires awe and fear be reparative? Maybe. Art can call attention to the need for mending in many different ways. In the future, O’Arwisters intends to make his pieces larger, so that their meaning/ feeling is more clear. “I am planning to make work that, instead of looking down to see it, you have to look up, and walk around it. Something that’s as big or bigger than we are. Where fabric doesn’t look like fabric anymore. I think about how water can be transformed to ice, or steam. I’ve wondered how I as an artist could be so in tune with my materials that I could make them behave, make them appear like other materials. I want to know my instrument like a jazz musician, so well that I can improvise with it. To become the conduit for what the material wants to become.”

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III.

My job is not to pass my pain on to you, or anyone else. What I’ve learned is that when I am calm, I can make decisions that allow me to navigate in a positive way. How do I help others to do that?-R.O’A.

At the end of our first visit, I asked O’Arwisters about his name. He told me that he had needed to change it to be who he wanted to become. “My birthname came out of the Judeo-Christian heritage. No one expects much from a name that’s so common-- Timothy-- and I needed a name that would change my posture: that would put me in the world with confidence, in opposition to that heritage.

“My father, whose name was Arwisters, never mistreated me for being a gay child. Some men would have been embarrassed by my ways, my voice. As I got older, my dad never minded when I brought my boyfriends home. He would even show them around town! In the black church, the whole idea of gay and lesbian culture is still very unaccepted. So I took his name to remind me to have that kind of compassion. I added the o in the Celtic tradition, in which it means ‘child of.’

As for my first name, I think the word ramekin- the cooking dish-- is such a beautiful word. But I knew that if I spelled it that way it would confuse people. So I changed the spelling. You can’t dismiss it—it’s powerful. Ramekon.

“It’s through my work that I can be that person—be the most authentic, the most honest. That’s very important to me, that I am able to accept my journey as I am. Every day, I’m working with broken ceramics. And when people look at it, they see that the shards aren’t being thrown away, but embraced. Held firm. We all feel broken sometimes. We want people to mend us, hold us in their embrace. Come visit us when we’re feeling well, write a note. Hold our hands. Hear, without interrupting. Actually listen. It’s a gift to be heard. I do the best job I can.”

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Notes

[1] All quotes from Ramekon O’Arwisters are from conversations with the author.

[2] The San Francisco dump, aka. Recology, hosts a highly competitive and coveted artist’s residency, during which artists have a studio for four months and access to whatever the garbage trucks bring back to the transfer station: https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/artist-in-residence-program/

[3] 26,000 BCE. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/pottery-timeline.htm

[4] Like Jim Melchert, O’Arwisters further breaks pieces at times to get more interesting shapes.

[5] Or not so historically: Ahmaud Aubrey.

[6] Mood Fabrics has stores in LA and NYC, and the most extraordinary website: https://www.moodfabrics.com/fashion-fabrics/designer

[7] This subject is too large to address so briefly, but here are some artists and exhibitions: http://sonyaclark.com/medium/hair/
@Laetitiaky on Instagram makes astonishing sculpture out of her own hair.
African sculptor Meschac Gaba: http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibitions/meschac-gaba/selected/2
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywgq4j/9-artists-explore-black-hair-barbershop-culture

[8] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/sublime

I.

My work often involves paradox. An aesthetically appealing image, when observed from afar, does not reveal the thought-provoking content which becomes apparent when viewed at closer range. -Lisa Kokin, artist’s statement

Thread is the place where the textile subtext of our lives begins and ends, and the slender connection to everything between. As a material, thread winds its way so far back in time that it is impossible to determine or even imagine who might have first made it, patiently twisting together plant or animal fibers. Its starring role in myths and fairytales has made it a metaphor for everything from love to greed, continuity to endurance. Thread connects, corrects, mends and embellishes. It has even entered the world of the internet, as a term for chained remarks on a topic in an online discussion.

For Lisa Kokin, thread has always been both idea and material. Her immigrant parents were upholsterers by trade; her grandma worked in a tie factory. Kokin got her first sewing machine at nine, and soon began making her own clothes. As an artist, her work has included a substantial range of methods and materials, but thread itself has connected most of the parts of her career: used to stitch together disassembled books, old photographs, buttons, zippers; to create both words and images and- most recently—to transform thousands of shreds and tiny cut fragments of paper money into works of art.

Still, as much as Kokin finds sewing to be almost as familiar as walking or breathing, it serves as a means and not an end. For decades, her practice has been conceptually-driven, as familiar, every-day materials are used to address subjects which she has described wryly as “hard to talk about.” It is all but impossible, she has discovered, for people to agree about the rightness or wrongness of certain actions. What is clearly inevitable and necessary to some is just as obviously ignorant and superfluous in the eyes of others, particularly in the context of religion and government. Sometimes, she asserts, the only way to come at an issue is indirectly; to show and not tell. Subjects she has made work about range from the deeply personal to the broadly political. They include, among other things, the impossible panaceas offered by self-help books; her own complicated relationship to Jewishness and Israel; guns and violence, environmental degradation, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act.

Since the 2016 presidential campaign began, she has been preoccupied with the grotesquely outsized role that money has come to play in elections, controlling outcomes as it flattens all dissent in its path, destroying institutions and people. She sees her current work as a way to process her grief for the death of democracy.

Mourning is something with which Kokin is deeply familiar. After her mother’s death in 2011, she spent some nine months making a body of work that was both about and for her deceased parent. “When there’s a death, you need to close the hole that’s left by the loss … it was a kind of psychological mending. Though I wouldn’t have used that word. We had a good relationship, so there was nothing to fix. And she had had dementia for many years before. She was almost 100, but it was still a loss. The work helped me to get the closure I needed.”

In art as well as life, thread’s role depends on how it is employed. Woven, it becomes a surface, goods, stuff-- a thing. In contrast, when used to sew, thread usually serves as a means, connecting or decorating other materials. For Kokin, thread has come to occupy a magical place between these two, successfully functioning as both through an ingenious combination of method and material. Using her machine, she sews intricate images (and often text) onto a water-soluble matrix—a translucent polyvinyl alcohol film[1]. When the completed piece is washed, the film dissolves. Only the thread remains, becoming, like a spider’s net, a miraculous thing that is both delicate and surprisingly strong.

Just before she passed away, it seemed as though Kokin’s mother knew that the end was imminent—or had, in some sense, become ready for it. During a visit two days before her death, Kokin remembers her saying emphatically, over and over, “Take me home NOW.”

In the months that followed, Kokin sewed these last words over and over, as they became the basis of several pieces. In two horizontally-oriented rectangles, the word now is most clearly readable. The stitched script, chains of thread and words, evokes both stria and strata—scratched marks on the surface of rock, as well as successive layers, accumulated over time. The horizontal rectangle suggests an open book, its pages completely covered with scribbled words.

This idea of marks serving as a kind of record-making or -keeping is evoked even more strongly in the circular pieces that came next. Including the word record in their titles, Kokin created a double meaning (as she often does), referring not only to the notation of speech that these represent, but additionally to the resemblance of these pieces to vinyl LPs. In one, the words take me home now are stitched in a spiral, like the grooves into which a needle enters to play a record’s sound. At the same time, the densely sewn text looks a bit like tree rings, while the pieces’ overall form makes us think of clocks, sundials, and countless other measuring devices.

Prayers in Hebrew appeared in two haunting works titled Ninety-nine Leaves #1 and #2. These cascading veils of pale leaf ‘skeletons’ incorporate delicate shreds of printed text taken from the remains of a prayer book Kokin found at a salvage yard.

In both of these pieces, there is one leaf for each of her mother’s years. Kokin found and pressed the actual leaves that served as her patterns in the course of a walk she took a few hours after her mother had died. These familiar shapes—maple, oak, eucalyptus-- function both as apt symbols of the transience of life itself and as a reminder of its cycling return.

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II.

No one values money in this impotent state. It no longer has the ability to poison relationships, threaten democracy, topple governments, create privilege and misery. Stitched together with metallic thread into textile fragments or wrapped around wire and made into crowns, the material is re-contextualized with a new value and purpose. --Lisa Kokin

Since we began to think of ourselves as modern, artists have been experimenting with unusual materials—sometimes out of necessity, when little else is available, but just as often as a deliberate choice. Sometimes a medium conveys its own set of pre-existing meanings before the maker even begins, creating a mission or expressing an attitude merely by being itself.

Take money, for example. A surprising number of people have chosen to manipulate currency, whether by stamping single bills with text (Rirkrit Tiravanija) or painting out all but a few select details (Hanna van Goeler), the latter approach drawing attention to what remains in a rectangular field of white gouache. Mark Wagner destroys thousands in paper bills every year, cutting them into fragments to construct elaborate and mostly figurative collages. Justine Smith shapes the money into guns, tools, and delicate flowers. Ray Beldner sews it into replicas of famous works of art[2].

Though these works are all different, they have a crucial element in common. They make us think about money’s symbolic nature—both in terms of its value and, in some cases, the imagery used on it. The exchange of paper currency is a supreme act of faith, since it is no longer backed by reserves of silver or gold, as it once was. When governments need more money, they simply print it, though this can have-- unfortunate consequences[3].

For Kokin, the troubled relationship between money and power has remained compelling, though years have passed since she began to consider its implications and respond to it. In the months before November 2016’s presidential election, as the rhetoric about immigrants and walls and ‘fake news’ heated up, she funneled her increasing distress into making pieces out of currency. She called the body of work Lucre—a word that rarely appears without its modifier ‘filthy,’ due in part to the fact that it refers to money obtained dishonestly. In the ‘90s, Kokin had experimented with a bag of shredded bills before moving on to other materials. Decades later, a combination of disbelief and despair compelled her to take this material up again. “You can’t help seeing every day the destructive role that money and profits are having in the world. Money comes before anything and everything,” she told me. And it does. Our current crisis (as I write this, Covid19 has spread throughout the world) has made the gap wider and more dangerous than ever: the gap, that is, between the one percent holding most of the nation’s wealth and everyone else.

Though deconstructed bills are available from a variety of sources—Etsy, ebay, Amazon—Kokin buys hers five pounds at a time from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. “The thing that I love about it,” she said, showing me a bag with an official seal, “is its fragmented nature. I sort the bits of money into different categories, by color and shape.

“The titles of the pieces are a hint, but I don’t go out of my way to make it obvious that it’s money. People have to really look to see what the work is made out of. It’d even be fine if they don’t get it.”

When she says things like this, I sometimes wonder if Kokin is making a private joke. Her sense of humor, evident in the aforementioned titles, exploits various kinds of plays on words or historical references, all of which help to lay a trail of breadcrumbs regarding possible interpretations. Sometimes meanings are hilariously (if painfully) obvious. Profit and Loss is a giant zero, painstakingly assembled out of a diagonal grid of metallic thread sewn through delicate shreds of bills.

Cold Comforter is a life-sized (five feet by three feet) rectangle of- holes. There is really no other way to describe the delicate network of mostly gray, irregular cells: empty centers with edges constructed out of bill shreds bound in silvery thread. As Renny Pritikin wrote in a 2018 essay about Kokin, “A blanket full of holes is cold comfort, as is a compromised social safety net[4].”

Other pieces refer directly to Trump’s favorite project, the much-vaunted wall. (De)portable is constructed out of dense-looking ‘bricks’ of textured green papier mache—one of few of Kokin’s ‘money’ works that is not sewn. Beyond the Pale is an exquisite double grid, squares and diamonds, made of thread and shreds of bills: a severely elegant geometric abstraction that suddenly, shockingly, reveals its resemblance to a chain link fence. For Jews, the expression ‘beyond the pale’ can be understood as referring to much more than acting outside the bounds of acceptable behavior. The Pale was the part of the Imperial Russian empire within which Jews were permitted to live between 1791 and 1917—an increasingly small area that, at one point, was home to 40% of the world’s Jewish population. Recurrent pogroms and increasingly restrictive decrees led to massive emigration, much of it to the United States. After WW1, most of the Pale became the restored country of Poland. A generation later, all but a few of Jews who remained there died in the Holocaust.

As a young adult, Kokin worked towards political change throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. She was active in the Latin America solidarity movement against intervention in Chile after the coup in 1973, later focusing on El Salvador and Nicaragua. She funneled her artistic energy into figurative batiks about countries “trying to throw off the yoke of U.S.imperialism,” showing this work in Brazil, Nicaragua and Europe. “I was invited by the Sandinistas to have a solo show in 1983… I’d gone to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade in 1979, building housing for textile workers.” At some point, however, her desire to mend the world politically through leftist imagery began to shift. “I wanted my art to influence people's opinions and help promote change. A not unreasonable thing for a young person to believe...but in retrospect somewhat naïve.”

After returning to school—she had interrupted her education for political activism—her convictions did not change, but her interest turned towards other materials and approaches. She realized that “there's a lot of grey between the black and the white. I no longer aim to convince, merely to show… I still feel that capitalism is an inhumane system and always will feel that. What the alternative is is not so clear to me. I don't hold up Cuba anymore as some kind of gold standard, because the suppression of dissent is problematic for me.”

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III.

I like money in its shredded state because it is stripped of value and power. Worthless, it becomes just so much green and white confetti. It is literally not worth the paper it’s printed on. -LK

It is difficult to ignore the parallels between today’s anti-immigrant xenophobia and yesteryear’s religious/ cultural persecution. Or, for that matter, to view an increasing aggrandizement of executive branch power with anything but panic. The latter, and its unpleasant whiff of oligarchy bordering on neo-monarchy, has clearly been on Kokin’s mind. A protracted series of elaborate money-and-thread doilies, collectively titled Let them Eat Cake, serves as a reminder of where runaway uber-privilege has ended in the past[5].

Then there’s a group of towering crowns made from wire wrapped in bill shreds. Topped with ‘jewels’ thriftily made from a mass of multicolored thread ends, dog hair and dust collected from the studio floor, these imaginative examples of headgear are both ridiculous and sublime, one resembling nothing so much as a dunce cap.

Other works resemble fragments of ancient textile, or abstract Minimalist compositions, but the titles always offer clues. From the crazy quilts of tiny fragments in the Almighty series to the ‘log cabin’ pattern of Void; the hounds-tooth of Dog Eat Dog, to the elaborate repeating floral scrolls of Brokeade, Kokin is mending money as a way to talk about the breakdown of the social fabric.

Where do the bills come from, I wonder. She shrugs. A little digging online reveals that money is shredded under three circ*mstances: when it wears out, when it’s discovered to be a forgery, and when it’s misprinted. Some of the bill fragments in Kokin’s work are worn, while others appear to be brand new.[6]

I think about all the other materials Kokin has used over the years: old photographs, buttons, zippers, books, and various random patinaed junk. I wonder how many more money-based pieces she will make. She keeps having ideas, she tells me. And keeps feeling that it’s really important to bring these issues into the public eye.

“The government breaks the money, and I put it back together… in so many different ways,” she says, smiling. “The work itself is what keeps me sane.”

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Footnotes

[1] https://www.sulky.com/catalog/sub/stabilizer/wash-away/solvy

[2] Notably, two different artists have literally made art out of honoraria, confronting viewers with money’s sheer physical presence. In 2011, German Conceptualist Hans-Peter Feldman turned the $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize into (used) dollar bills and covered the walls of a gallery at the Guggenheim Museum. More than twenty years earlier, Ann Hamilton took the $10,000 stipend she had received from San Francisco’s Capp Street Foundation and converted it into pennies, laying them in an overlapping carpet of gleaming brown copper that covered much of the space’s concrete floor.

[3] Printing more money, unless output also increases, can result in higher prices for available goods. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1377/economics/effect-of-printing-money-on-economy/

[4] Renny Pritikin, in “Lucre: Lisa Kokin,”Seager Gray Gallery, 2018, p. 15

[5] Attributed to Marie Antoinette, this phrase—supposedly uttered when she was told the peasants had no bread to eat—was more likely said by an earlier French queen. It has been used numerous times in recent years to describe an attitude of callousness towards and disregard for the working poor, or, during the government shutdown in 2019, towards federal workers struggling to survive without wages.

[6] According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, bills last varying periods of time before being taken out of circulation, from an average of 4.5 years, for a $10 bill, to 15 years ($100s). Though this figure may be changing due to the prevalence of credit and debit card transactions, bills are constantly being pulled and shredded. https://www.bostonfed.org/news-and-events/news/2019/07/when-bills-go-bad.aspx

I.
My first encounter with Jaydan Moore’s work was a shock. It was the kind of experience I yearn for, wandering through unfamiliar cities or museums. Turning the corner at an art fair, I found myself contemplating an object so rivetingly strange that I just stood there, gaping, until someone shoved me. (I was standing in the path of traffic.)

Picture a gleaming silver tray: the kind of thing that, once upon a time, was a familiar sight on the sideboard in homes both humble and grand across America. Made for serving tea, or maybe little sandwiches and biscuits, such trays are square, rectangular, oval or round, and are often engraved or stamped with elaborate scrolling patterns of leaves and stylized flowers.

Now imagine ten or fifteen of these things, some tarnished and scratched, sawed into fragments with exquisite precision. Various parts are joined with others as if they grew that way, creating a meandering linear serving piece of improbable dimensions. (See above.) Or…

they become a vast, amoeba-like formation, handles protruding from its edges like alien ears. At the center, there’s an accumulation of metal shards; much of the rest looks like disintegrating lace. Many fragments are the dark, dull gray of thunderclouds, but shiny glints of mirror-like surfaces emerge, then disappear into a crazy quilt of mystery metal.

Since 2012, Moore has been experimenting with this extraordinary process of collage/ bricolage, soldering together old silverplate: primarily salvers and trays, but also trophies and tableware. Sourced originally from second-hand stores or flea markets, his ‘raw’ material now comes mostly from Ebay—where somewhere between five and six thousand such pieces are offered for sale every day, for a dollar and up (plus shipping).

These once-treasured objects embody countless lost histories. Heirlooms, gifts for weddings or anniversaries, even commemorative awards for achievements or service—all have been relegated to late capitalism’s vast trash heap of discarded stuff. Each one bears the evidence of wear: what Moore refers to as the “accumulated layering of worth, far more precious than the most valuable of materials.” Although his intention is to salvage objects that have lost their social (and monetary) value, he never removes their patina of age or traces of neglect. The stains remain. Even the way cut parts are stitched together with solder (and, often, reinforced with hidden discs of metal) invokes the conservator’s careful preservation of memories. Deep pasts, though anonymized, are left in every mark and dent.

But why was all this stuff as good as discarded? The answer is complicated. Some of it has to do with the representation and enactment of class: a subject we Americans shy away from, but which is present in our lives nonetheless. Economic and social upheaval played a role as well. I spent hours in libraries and deep on-line dives, leapfrogging from one peculiar specialist site to another, trying to ferret out why something once considered an indispensable sign of status, manners and mores: an essential part of the guest-host ritual, has been summarily discarded. To begin, though, here is the first thing I learned— the difference between a tray, a platter and a salver.

II.
She expected everything in life to be handed to her on a silver platter.— Anon.

The word salver dates to sometime in the seventeenth century, and comes from the Latin salvare—meaning to save (possibly, because the food or drink served on it had been tested by a servant for poison before it reached the table)[1]. If you owned a salver, you were someone important. Unlike trays or platters, early salvers were flat and had no handles, though some had feet. Their use was more ceremonial, whereas trays carried increasingly heavy loads, like a full tea or coffee service.

In the opening decades of the 19th century, pieces made out of solid silver (referred to by the English, inexplicably, as plate) were still costly and highly prized.[2] Eating on silver dishes or displaying pieces of it in your home, such as candle sticks, trays, tea pots, utensils, etc., was still something reserved for the very, very rich. (Hence the expression ‘born with a silver spoon in her mouth.’) A process did exist for making somewhat more economical pieces by sandwiching a layer of copper between two wafers of silver before smithing the material into something[3].

It was, however, the discovery of electroplating[4] that really changed metalsmithing. By placing an object made out of an alloy of copper, zinc and nickel into a bath of electrically-charged water mixed with silver nitrate and potassium cyanide, a shiny, perfect layer only .0003 inches thick could be deposited onto its surface. No further finishing work was required, and—clearly-- very little actual precious metal was involved.

Suddenly, all kinds of silvery things were within the reach of the middle class, as the Industrial Revolution, in full swing by the mid-nineteenth century, drove a massive increase in production capacity. Here in the US, something else supported domestic manufacturing: protective tariffs. In 1842, rates were pushed up to 30% for imported manufactured goods--silver and silverplate alike. Foreign pieces were suddenly disastrously expensive, and American production boomed.

In the last quarter of the 1800s, “the dining room was one of the most important spaces in the home, where good manners and elegant appointments reinforced the moral and aesthetic world of the family and their visitors.[5]” Better transportation made all kinds of food available from coast to coast, and each new treat required its own serving dish or implement. There were oyster forks, asparagus plates, sardine tongs; picks for lobster or nuts, servers for cucumber or tomatoes. Butter, still a luxury, came to the table on tiny individual dishes. Knowing how to deploy all these implements correctly was a sign of good breeding. (Or, at the very least, a good memory.)

This list of ten standard wedding presents from the 1950s does not include silver. What eighteen- year-old new wife would want to add polishing trays and teapots to a relentless round of cooking, cleaning, child care, and making herself desirable by the time her husband came home? She had enough jobs, salaried or not.

Of course, some heirlooms were still passed down from one generation to another. Nowadays, though, most Millennials don’t want any of their parents’ stuff-- from the ‘good’ china to the engraved soup spoons, the bric a brac to the brown furniture. Things like a silverplate salver or sugarbowl seemingly have even less appeal. Repurposed examples can be found on Etsy-- transmogrified into planters or picture frames, often painted in bright colors.

Does it say something about us as a people that so many once aspired to be silver platter owners, and then-- did not? In a single lifetime, so much has changed. As recently as the ‘60s, men and women still wore hats in public, and women, gloves. (And girdles, hose, and dresses… every single day, even when doing housework. Some change is undeniably positive.) Perhaps the fall of silverplate resulted from a loss of social ritual—and, with it, faith in the social order[7].

III.
For Moore, the fourth generation of a family of memorialists, rehabilitating such a material seemed like a natural choice. His great-grandfather, who lived right next to Oakland’s St. Mary’s Cemetery, ran a business making tombstones and memorials. Moore’s grandfather John Silva, a Portuguese immigrant, married into the family business, eventually starting his own company. At present, his daughter—that is, Moore’s mother-- is running it.

As a small child, Moore remembers listening to people grieve, as they tried to figure out how to best remember a recently-departed loved one with words carved into stone. It was part of his daily life. He also recalls noticing that, unlike most other families he knew, his relatives made things with their hands for a living. (Moore’s aunt and uncle are Marilyn and Jack Da Silva, noted metal artists and professors.) His dad’s self-sufficiency around the house impressed him, and at five, he wanted to be able to make everything in his own home when he grew up.

He isn’t tired of silverplate yet—and even when he steps away from it, someday in the future, he won’t stop using found/recycled materials. He loves the fact that he isn’t contributing to mining or other resource depletion.

Even now, virtually nothing is wasted in his studio. Table Scraps (2016) is a Frankenstein-like patchwork of pieces from many sources, framed by an elaborate misshapen edge. (Many of Moore’s titles are similar plays on words.) Trimmed-off rims and handles have been repurposed into a number of pieces that, like a stack of empty picture frames or the ghosts of mirrors, invoke skeletal wreaths.

In Coil (2019), he makes use of those elaborate edges in a yet another way, creating a dense, shield-like form—though the hole in its middle seems more playful than martial. He is constantly thinking of ways to use it all, as demonstrated by a group of small ‘sketches’ hanging on his studio wall.

Occasionally, before disassembling a platter or tray, he makes a print, inking it like an intaglio plate. The incised or stamped lines are transformed into a delicate tracery of gray and black, a bit like the rubbings that people sometimes make from old gravestones[8]. Scratches are suddenly more visible, as well as other marks of age. If someone gives him an heirloom platter — which happens from time to time— he offers this printed memento in exchange. He tells me about how the parents in one family had both passed away, and he made a print of their treasured platter for all three of the adult children. None of them wanted the object, but each was happy to have this souvenir of its existence.

And what relationship does he see his practice having to mending, I ask him. “Giving life to things a little longer is a form of repair,” he replies. “I am making objects that were likely to get scrapped, into something that shows their value, their evolution. I am only a snapshot in their life.”

He points to an area where he has carefully excised parts of a pattern until the edge of the piece seems to be on the verge of disintegration. “The piercing is a way of showing that they are aesthetic objects, but even that is beginning to disappear. Like moths are eating them. All objects have multiple histories. Maybe someday my own pieces will go through another evolution.”

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1] Or, possibly, the word comes from the Spanish salva, used to describe such a serving dish. Not surprisingly, there are multiple origin stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salver

[2] Though not as expensive as aluminum—which, until a process was developed for its extraction in the 1880s, was valued above all other metals. According to Slate (7/3-/2010), “The French government once displayed Fort Knox-like aluminum bars next to the crown jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a set of aluminum cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.) The United States, to show off its industrial prowess, even capped the Washington monument with a six-pound pyramid of aluminum in 1884.”

[3] This product is called ‘Sheffield plate,’ which is confusing because there are also various companies called Sheffield that still make electroplated silver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_plate

[4] The first patent for electroplating was issued in 1840, but the process actually dates back to 1805. “As frequently occurs with inventions, the early process was expanded and manipulated over the course of several decades by different individuals, and owes much of its success to other inventions.” https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/custom-manufacturing-fabricating/electroplating-development/

[5] “Silver in America: 1840-1940, A Century of Splendor,” Ellen Marsh, Humanities Magazine, November-December 1994, page 36

[6] “…six out of ten urban white families above the poverty line in the South had a full-time domestic servant, compared with under 20% in the North.” The Economist, 8/20/2014. The relationship between race and domestic labor is much more complicated than this single passing mention indicates, and this subject deserves further ‘mending’ consideration.

[7] Or maybe it’s just a matter of a change in taste. Other bizarrely anachronistic traditions remain: the full length, virginal Victorian white wedding dress, for example.

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_rubbing

I.

I like words that start with re: rethink, revisit, reassess, reenter. I think that’s how our minds work—we keep circling the same issues, but with increasing clarity and depth. -Jim Melchert

Jim Melchert’s work of the past thirty years can be described, at once accurately and poetically, as a transcendent exploration of mending. Using commercially-manufactured floor tile as his primary material, Melchert engages in deliberate breakage and consequent, system-based repair and elaboration.

Still, these words hardly seem to do justice to the elegant permutations and combinations of color and line that spread across Melchert’s compositions of reassembled shards. In pieces that range in size from a single twelve-inch square to dozens of them combined together in a vast mural, he systematically follows lines of fracture with planned actions. These include, but are not limited to, painting lines of glaze—single marks or repeated bands that echo across the reassembled surface; marking the surface with dots that map sharp bumps or hidden corners along the tiles’ edges, invisible to observers; drawing or painting circles that form a grid, or are scattered across a surface like a handful of tossed marbles, and linear gestures that echo the broken shapes themselves. In a recent series titled Vertices for Dancing, for example, small bicolored orbs spill across the spidery cracks, seemingly engaged in some complicated fandango.

Most of these pre-ordained actions take place in relation to the pointed end of the largest broken pieces. This is the spot where, as Melchert explains, the energy moving through the fired clay has found the weakest link, breaking the chained molecules-- much as soil and rocks separate along a fault line in an earthquake. Factory-made tiles may seem identical and uniform, but on a microscopic level they are as unique as snowflakes. Clay consists of a mass of tiny plates, their bonds stronger in some places than in others. Once fired, it breaks according to the specific distribution of these strengths and weaknesses.

This moment is usually perceived as the end of the life of a ceramic object, rather than its beginning. (Melchert is amused by the fact that “once you break a tile, no one is going to give you two cents for it—but after you work on it, they’ll pay a lot for it. Art is so much about transformation—straw into gold. Clay is just mud, but artists make something from it.”) Shattering, he explains, has become the opening gambit for a Zen-like interaction. “The gift the clay gives you as a partner is when you discover the interior structure. But it’s like someone who has just made a first move in checkers—it’s like a challenge, and then you move, then other person makes a move. Whatever I do, the tile comes back with a response.”

II.

People solve problems in many ways. Once I gave my studio assistant a tile I had broken and asked if she could repair it with masking tape but with as little tape as possible. She mended it in a few seconds and differently from how I would have done it. Afterwards I gave the same problem to various friends when they dropped by. I glazed the repaired tiles except where there was masking tape.-JM, Repair Series, 2003

Melchert’s absorption of the ideas that have driven avant-garde art for the past sixty years began during his first stint in graduate school. By the time he enrolled at the University of Chicago’s MFA program to study painting in 1955, he’d gotten a BA in art history at Princeton and spent four years in post-war Japan teaching English. Posted to Sendai --a northern city where the US believed there was industry, and thus bombed most of it flat—he remembers walking through vast empty areas where houses had once stood. He met other young Americans; most were sent there by church groups- the American Friends were particularly active—including Mary Ann Hostetler, a Mennonite preparing for missionary work who would become his wife.

The curriculum at the U of C was still somewhat traditional, including not even a whisper of Abstract Expressionism. Outside of school, however, Melchert met interesting figures in the city’s art world who introduced him to new ideas. His own paintings remained steadfastly representational; for his thesis show, he produced a triptych of still lives that “owed a lot to German Expressionism.[2]”

Once he’d completed his MFA, he took a teaching position at a small college in Illinois so he could continue to paint. As the only art faculty, he was asked to lead a ceramics class. Over the course of the semester, he became increasingly interested in the possibilities that clay offered. So it was that the following summer he spent some weeks in Missoula, Montana, taking a workshop with one of the medium’s most notorious young rebels, Pete Voulkos.

The experience was transformational. Voulkos showed students slides of works by painters such as Rothko, Kline and de Kooning, as well as ceramics by Miro and Picasso. Melchert was so inspired by both class and teacher that he decided that he would pursue a second master’s degree. With his wife and three young children, he pulled up stakes, and they moved to Berkeley in 1959. Voulkos had just begun to teach there, at the University of California.

[It is hard for me to imagine now what it must have been like to arrive in the Bay Area at the end of the fifties. My own family had just moved away, my parents having finished their graduate degrees at UC Berkeley, courtesy of the GI Bill. In later years, my mother often alluded to the way it was getting crazy when they left—poets! Beatniks!—though she found some things Californian, like artichokes and avocados, to be delicious.]

Despite their years in Japan, for a young couple from the Midwest like the Melcherts, their new home must have seemed like an exotic adventure. On Sundays, they would take out a map and place a dot on a random spot and then just put the kids in the car and drive there to see what it looked like[3]. In time, of course, the strange became familiar. Melchert still lives and works in the hundred-year-old house in the Oakland hills where he and his family moved in 1964.

In 1961, having completed his MFA in ceramics, he returned to teaching: first at the San Francisco Art Institute, and then at UC Berkeley. In his own studio, he felt he had a lot of catching up to do, having attended a liberal arts college rather than art school. He was working with clay, but, intensely curious about breaking-edge practices like performance and conceptualism, he began to experiment.

Three years later, his solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art consisted of slide projections. He also made a series of ‘graphite rubbings’-- soft outlines of a square or rectangle on sheets of paper or envelopes, indicating the hidden presence of a photograph. The picture would be described in the work’s title, but remained unseen. You had to simultaneously imagine it-- and take it on faith that it actually existed[5].

An even bigger change in his life as an artist was coming. In 1977, Melchert was tapped for the challenging job of directing the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington. The job was enormous and absorbed all of his time. Towards the end of four and a half grueling years, he was invited to a conference in Italy. When he stopped off in Cairo to visit his son, he remembers seeing a great deal of architectural tile work—something that has been developed to an extraordinarily high level of refinement in that part of the world. “The walls weren’t these big solid things containing space. The walls were the skin of space.[6]”

It occurred to him that working with and on ceramic tile might yield some interesting results. It was also a way to repair his fractured relationship with clay.

He began experimenting with pattern, but found its tyranny stifling. “You begin at one side,” he has recalled, “and you must carry it out over a whole field.” Then, in 1984, he was appointed to serve as the head of the American Academy in Rome. During his tenure there, both his time for art making and his access to ceramic facilities were limited, so he focused on making large drawings. He resumed working with tile again after his return to Berkeley in 1988, and since his retirement from teaching, he has been in the studio full time.

III.

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.—Leonard Cohen

When looking at Melchert’s broken and reassembled pieces, it can be fruitful to try to focus on the way each seemingly-random network of cracks follows that hidden molecular path: the line of least resistance. The act of breaking alters the perfection of the square, reducing it to a group of fragments. Glaze is then selectively painted on the surface of all or some of these sharp-edged pieces, which are (re)fired in a kiln. When all of the parts are reassembled to make a square once more, the stripes or dots or circles of glaze draw attention to the randomness of the cracks, even as they make the breakage into something harmonious.

“I liked seeing what resulted when the shards were reassembled,” Melchert wrote about these pieces. “The field of dots reminded me of both constellations above, and land seen below from an airplane at night with its many scattered lights from settlements.[7]”

The word yield is both active and passive, noun and verb, and can mean both producing and giving up, or possibly both at the same time. Melchert’s multi-tile compositions from this time similarly evoke a mischievously diverse range of antecedents, ranging from Carl Andre’s floor pieces to Robert Irwin’s early dot paintings, or even Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14). When I look at them now—I first wrote about them in 2002—they make me think of delicate ink paintings of cherry blossoms, or winter berries on slender branches.

In the Repair series (2003), Melchert experimented with a different approach. Asking others to ‘fix’ a broken tile using the fewest pieces of tape possible, he then glazed all but the taped-over areas. In a way, these are the opposite of the Yield works, in which the dots record imperfections that, through touch, only he was privy to. There is something charmingly obvious about the Repairs, but also anomalous: they require participation by others.

The Eye Sites series of 2006-8 focuses on drawing our attention to the flow of energy through the breaking tile. A thick diagonal line of either graphite or glaze leads from the acute, knife-sharp points of selected shards into those fragments’ broadest expanses. Again, the punning title offers multiple readings. Perhaps the line’s function is to lead the viewer to a visual resting place (asitefor sore eyes?). Each line also looks like the letterI. The edges of the graphite marks have a delicate, ghostlike softness, as if they have been physically worked into the tile’s surface.

Sometimes, the marks Melchert chooses to make are dictated by the shape of a fragment’s longest edge. Tracing it, he makes a cardboard template, used to lay out each succeeding painted line. In To RE-Descend (2007), the lines parallel each other, like the marks created in raked gravel found in Japanese gardens. In other pieces, he fans the lines as they advance across a fragment’s surface. In 26 Minutes (2008), this process results in the delicate illusion of multiple vanishing points, or some mysterious system of topographical rendering. The lines in Eighteen Seconds (2008) ripple and curve until they suggest ribbed three dimensional forms.

This counterpoint between freeform blobs and carefully-limned circles suggests music, which is not surprising. Other bodies of work— Scores and Performances (2013) and Piano Scores (2014) -- refer directly to notation and composition. In the first of these, grids of drawn circles interact with painted color and form, in increasingly complicated ways. The drawn circles, Melchert told me, are the scores; the painted ones, in vivid blue, red or orange, are the performances. Piano Scores reflects his love for jazz— Duke Ellington, in particular— but also suggests the dynamic relationship between black and white keys.

Chance was an important element in the creation of these works; he would spin a plastic ruler on each fragment and draw its two parallel edges where it stopped moving. Melchert used the same spinning-ruler system to create Riven/ River (2014), his public art piece at San Francisco Airport, a six by fourteen foot tour de force.

When the Cat in Copy-cat was a dog (2016) takes the shape of a simple break and replicates it, like an echo or a shadow. A suite of pieces from this series, now in the collection of the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, includes the photograph that seemingly gives the series its name. It shows his granddaughter and the family dog, lying on his dining room floor next to each other in the same crossed-leg repose. This charming, funny picture seems to reach back far into Melchert’s artistic past, touching on his experiments with performance, projected images, and even the envelope rubbings. At the same time, it reveals his openness to the moment: a willingness to accept what comes his way by chance and allow it to lead him towards something new.

IV.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few. -Shunryu Suzuki

The arc of an artist’s career is usually described in such a way that the more mundane parts, such as employment (since most artists today do have other work besides their studio practice) remain magically invisible. In Melchert’s case, these other activities are inextricably interwoven with the objects and ideas he has produced over the past five decades. His commitment to a larger community through leadership and teaching never altered his intense interest in making art. Still, the meandering path he has taken (Washington, Rome, academia) has led to his work being less widely known than that of many of his peers—particularly considering the level of international recognition and exposure that his early work received: inclusion in numerous important exhibitions at places like the Whitney Museum of American Art, Documenta, and Biennials in Sydney and Sao Paulo, as well as numerous solo shows. Alluding to this once, he remarked that his re-entry in the Bay Area art world after his directorship at the American Academy wasn’t without its difficulties, saying wryly, “When you get off the bus and you get back on later, you find that you don’t always have a seat.[8]”

I asked him once if he thought that art could heal society. He thought for a moment, and then started talking about the Great Depression—a time when mending was urgent. There were magazines in the early ‘30s, he told me, that taught people how to make things for themselves, which was both comforting and empowering.

“And there’s singing,” he continued. “In churches, everyone singing together gives people a true feeling of unity. Or in Zen practice, the chanting… these are all mediums for mending and healing.”

The excitement and enthusiasm with which he still approaches making work invokes the great Zen teacher Shunru Suzuki’s ‘Beginner’s Mind’-- a place where there are always fresh possibilities for someone who remains open to them. Melchert’s most recent pieces are made from black tiles, onto which he applies irregular shapes of white glaze punctuated with tiny circles in primary colors. The conversation between black and white is mysterious and lively, as one or the other alternately recedes or pushes forward, their stacked forms following the long curving cracks. They bring to mind birds, or paper caught by a breeze. Thinking back to what has come before them, I believe that I can see how they came about. At the same time, they seem like something altogether new.

From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs… At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself… I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign myself 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.’-Hokusai Katsushika

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[1] “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 1967
[2] Oral history interview with James Melchert, 2002 September 18-October 19, by Renny Pritikin, Smithsonian Archives of American Art
[3] “A conversation with Jim Melchert: Lucky breaks,” Richard Whitaker, in Works & Conversations, 12/1/2007 http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=129
[4] Harrod, “Out Of The Studio, Or, Do We Make Better Work In Unusual Conditions?”,Dorothy Wilson Perkins Lecture, Alfred University, 11/5/2009 https://ceramicsmuseum.alfred.edu/perkins_lect_series/harrod/
[5] I remember encountering a group of these pieces at the Art Center in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977, and being enchanted by both the idea and the execution: the small, neat writing below soft gray rectangles and squares. I didn’t realize these were Melchert’s pieces (having long since forgotten the artist’s name) until many years after I had met him and begun to write about his work.
[6] Conversation with John Held Jr., 2016, quoted in “Palpable Space: Jim Melchert’s ceramics,” SFAQ, June 21 2016
[7] Artist’s website
[8] Oral history interview with James Melchert, 2002 September 18-October 19, by Rennie Pritikin, Smithsonian Archives of American Art

As the Encyclopedia Britannica notes dryly in its entry on decorative art, the distinction established between media such as ceramics, glassware, textiles and jewelry and the more elevated fine arts (principally sculpture and painting) is largely a modern one. Such a hierarchy-- based on the notion that the decorative arts comprise useful objects and fine art, that which is purely aesthetic-- seems arbitrary. In the context of contemporary practice, ‘functional’ has taken on a whole new set of meanings. Nick Dong’s Mendsmith project exemplifies this conceptual complexity. Through a combination of social practice and extraordinary craftsmanship, Dong focuses on a kind of emotional, psychological and spiritual repair.

The road to realizing his mending venture has taken a complicated series of twists and turns. A degree in painting and mixed media in college was followed by military service in his native Taiwan. Dong then attended graduate school at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he started working with metals. He described his first encounter with this new material to me as “falling in love.” Drawn to the full spectrum of new possibilities that metal offered, he made both large installations and functional personal objects, experimenting widely.

He finished his degree in 2002, taking a job in San Francisco as a bench jeweler[1] at a high-end store. His work often involved making wedding rings. Even when tasked with this relatively straightforward commission—one that usually focuses on what stones and metals clients prefer, using a design from a set repertoire-- Dong spent time talking with the prospective couples about themselves, transforming their stories into physical elements that he incorporated into the rings he made for them.

Now, the engraved messages of love that were originally inside each ring were face to face. Attaching the bands together in what he has described as ‘an eternal embrace,’ he made his first mend.

Another participant, Stephanie, had not ‘lost’ her husband: not to death, that is. He had survived a prolonged battle with brain cancer, diagnosed only eighteen months after they had married, but had been transformed by the experience from the brash, romantic man who had courted her into a different person.

During that courtship, Bill had presented Stephanie with three (!!) engagement rings, each with a larger diamond than the last. She brought these to Dong, supplemented with a cubic zirconia necklace Bill had also given her.

Dong joined all four stones in a single, bold setting that evokes a golden crown. In a way, it represents not only the couple’s marriage but their family, which now includes two children.

Dong took a necklace that the dog had destroyed in his rambunctious youth, creating curling, delicate bits of oxidized silver and assembling them into what looks like a ball of poodle hair. He suspended it from a red ribbon—echoing the scarlet collar that Diego once wore.

Ruth brought Dong a Scottish brooch her father had given her that honored their shared heritage. She had loved him and seemed to have spent much of her life feeling that she didn’t measure up to his expectations--but in the end, realized that he not only loved her but was proud of her accomplishments. Her mother had passed away and her father had remarried, so she also brought his two wedding rings.

Dong transformed the rings into a new brooch, similar in shape but decorated only with two simple gold beads, symbolizing how both her father’s nurturing and his example had helped her to become who she is. You can see Ruth and her father at the beginning of this essay.

_______________________________

After returning home, Dong tried to figure out the best way to continue mending. He thought about all the people who were sustaining unimaginable losses from natural disasters, or the mass migrations caused by war. He applied for grants to continue his project in different locations. It has been difficult, however, to persuade funders that such a labor-intensive, one-on-one process will yield significant enough results to merit financial support. Besides, he admitted to me, the grants he has applied for “were more about pushing jewelry to the next level – getting it to be regarded more as fine art.”

In the end, he decided to create his own opportunity. This summer, he took up residence for a month at Mercury20 Gallery in Oakland. Members of the public were once again invited to make appointments for a consultation. As with the Mendsmith Project in Asheville, they were asked to bring in small objects or pieces of jewelry, something of their own and something belonging to the loved one with whom repair of some kind was desired. Dong worked in the gallery during the month, bringing in a workbench and tools.

Six people signed up. I was one of them. (In the interests of research, I thought that this was the best way to learn about what he was doing.) All of the participants, as it turned out, were women; the same had been true in Asheville. “Maybe men can’t deal with grief the same way that women do— it’s a taboo subject. They aren’t supposed to be vulnerable,” Dong told me. He was silent for a minute. “Or maybe men aren’t as ready to share their stories with a random stranger.”

This time, two of the pieces he made were in memory of lost partners: Audrey, for her late husband Michael, and Megan, for her wife Angela. Four-- including my own—addressed the repair of relationships with long-gone parents or grandparents.

What is mending, anyway? The dictionary describes it as taking something that is damaged and making it whole or useful once again, free from faults or defects. It can also have a moral tone—mending your ways— and even refer to the return of health, when you are on the mend. Mending fences describes the act of making peace. The word implies something restorative and positive, whether gentle or radical. Mending is a kind of added value: an intervention, ranging from the invisible to all but replacing the matrix that serves as its host.

Over the next year, I’ll be writing here about contemporary artists for whom mending plays a significant role in their practice, providing some part of the impetus for work in a wide variety of media—not only textiles and ceramics, but metal, wood, photographs, painting, and even the world around us. Their motivations might be environmental, ethical, or purely formal. Some makers are practical bricoleurs; some are experimenters, some are healers. Some draw on traditional methods and practices, while others invent something astonishingly new.

There will be interviews, essays, and lots of pictures. If you know of a Mender, please drop me an email to tell me about her or him.

Here is a brief preview of some of the artists I am presently thinking about:

Debra Broz reinvents ceramic figurines by joining together disparate parts into brand-new wholes whose seamless perfection defies what we know as reality. Most are very funny as well.

Bouke De Vries often uses fragments of antique ceramics, drawing on his experience as a restorer to make viewers think about what value remains after something is broken.

For De Vries, mending is as much destruction as it is repair.

Jaydan Moore deconstructs and reassembles found silverplate tableware into previously unimagined configurations.

Helen O’Leary joins fragments of wood in abstract compositions that look as though they are lighter than air. She describes these pieces as part of a narrative that describes “greatness fallen on hard times.” She cuts apart the stretchers and panels of earlier paintings, gluing and patching them together: working the studio as her father worked the family farm in rural Ireland.

And Jan Voormann fills in holes in brick walls with plastic construction blocks. (Think Legos.)

There is always more mending to be done. Stay tuned.

Dearest friend:

The first fraternal twins I ever knew were Alice Shaw’s youngest siblings. It would be more appropriate to call them sororal, as in sisters, utterly unlike each other, as two children born from two different eggs would logically be. Like most people, I hadn’t really thought about this fact—that twins can be nonidentical, even as they are truly twins—but Alice has lived most of her life with such knowledge, having been seventeen when they were born. And while it isn’t the only reason she has long been interested in a constellation of ideas around twinning/ reflection of the self, I cannot help but think that it has been instrumental in the development of several bodies of her conceptually-driven work.

People Who Look Like Me (2006), a book project published by Gallery 16, features Shaw paired with someone/thing with whom/which she has some kind of visual commonality, however obscure it seems at times. A gap between front teeth revealed by an engaging grin; similar glasses, lipstick or clothes. In one memorable image, both figures wear the same hideous athletic shirt. After a while you figure out that, like Cindy Sherman, Shaw is experimenting with being a chameleon, finding and revealing secret shadow selves, even when the Other is a horrific wig-styling toy or an exotic tiger-striped Bengal cat. These are all portraits of non-identical twins, akin to Shaw’s little sisters.

This reverse-doppelgänger turns out to be a tall teenaged transsexual African American. In ten diptychs, Shaw and her Other strike similar poses, in similar states of dress/undress, in various rooms of a high-ceilinged Victorian house. I’ve never seen anything like these pictures. Their strangeness is enduring, and affects me as much now as it did when I first encountered them, over a decade ago.

In 2009, Shaw devoted an entire show to what she called (auto)biography. It included examples of handwriting analysis;of getting her palm and psyche read;of 'her' color (hot pink!), and even a rubbing of a tombstone engraved with her name. Though not strictly a consideration of pairs, these peculiar self-portraits suggested an alternate form of (un)duplication. The only actual pictures of Shaw that were in the show seem to suggest the extent to which a photograph can be manipulated to portray a fictional self. The first looks like a paparazzi candid-- Shaw as a giddy party girl in a preposterous hot pink lace-and-satin dress, nails and lips painted, a champagne flute in her hand and eyes closed in giggling rapture. The other is a haunting, silvery daguerrotype of the artist as an ghostly turbaned houri. Alter egos, separated at birth?

Sheep/3:03:38-3:27:44pm shows what appears to be many sheep in a wire pen, but, as the title reveals, is a multiple exposure in which only a single specimen was involved-- as is the case throughout the show.Casper, as he is called, belongs to one of Shaw’s friends.

There are only two exceptions to this sly starring role (so like Shaw’s own self-portraiture in its utter quirkiness). In one, a video Shaw took features Dolly, the world’s most famous cloned sheep, beautifully taxidermied and posed on a revolving pedestal at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.[1]

The other Casper-less work is Pair, the large carbon print photomural at the show’s entrance, of two lambs on a hillside. (you can see this image at the top of this text.) It was made from an old glass slide Shaw found on Ebay. (She originally conceived of it as providing atmosphere, rather than being part of the exhibition.)

The joke here, of course, is that most of us can’t tell one sheep (a word that is the same in its singular and plural form) from another. In fact, many viewers didn’t actually realize that the subject in all of these pictures is the same, single sheep. This elaborate conceit is a reminder of the thing that photography can do that other media can’t: make infinite numbers of all but identical replicas. Yet even though Shaw ‘clones’ Casper-- making pictures in multiple ways, old and new, traditional and artisanal --it’s almost as if she is asserting that he’s different, even if only in the tiniest and most subtle ways, from one moment to the next, aging imperceptibly, changing through experience and knowledge.

And, anyway: which picture is the original here, and which the duplicate? In an age of mechanical reproduction, which is the work of art and which is the barnyard animal? The mind reels.

100 Sheep, an artist’s book published by the gallery in conjunction with Clones, is essentially a flipbook of 100 images, shifting from a field of white, out of which Casper gradually emerges, to a rectangle of black. Flipping the pages brings to mind counting sheep as an aid to sleep, slipping (hopefully) into oblivion. It also serves as a melancholy reminder of the transient nature of all images. Everything, Shaw’s sheepish portrait seems to say, passes as quickly, lost in a torrent of news/ social media posts/ ads, ad nauseam.

I’ve written about Shaw’s work more than once—partly because I admire it and her, and partly because we have known each other since the mid ‘80s, when we both lived in a warehouse in East Oakland. I was a f*ckless young artist; she was attending SFAI, her sisters just toddlers. Time passed and we both moved on, and eventually I had my own non-identical sororal twins, giving a greater depth to my understanding of Shaw’s experiences and insights and maybe even enhancing my considerable pleasure in her originality and humor. But you don’t need to be a mother of twins to get it. As I once wrote, her work is a reminder of photography’s promise: that being able to see what we look like on the outside will somehow confer new knowledge of what lies within.

Time for me to end this. One last thing-- the next time you leave from San Francisco Airport for an international destination, don’t miss Shaw’s public art work in Departure Area A. Ironically (considering its location), it is the antithesis of transience: a photomural measuring 20 by 26 feet of a hillside of majestic redwoods, the interstitial sky between trunks and branches covered with gold leaf like a Byzantine icon. Here’s a preview for you.

Have a great trip, wherever you are headed next. And don’t forget—you take your mental landscape (and yourself, your Other) with you, wherever you go.

Yours in sororal solidarity,

Maria

PS-- It was no accident that the invention of photography and the inception of psychology happened simultaneously. They have always paralleled one another, and I feel there still remains much in common between the two disciplines. They introduced two new languages. They were two new structures to read how we see things. -Alice Shaw

PPS- To buy the book version of 'People Who Look Like Me' or '100 Sheep,' contact Gallery 16.

******************************

[1] http://dolly.roslin.ed.ac.uk/facts/the-life-of-dolly/index.html

McNay began buying in 1927. For the rest of her life, she continued, collecting 19th- and 20th-century European and American paintings and Southwest art. At her death in 1950, she left some 700 works of art, the house and its grounds, and what must have been a substantial endowment.
From that original nucleus, the collection has expanded to some 20,000 works. These include prints and drawings, theater arts, glass, and even Medieval and Renaissance art (a bit of an outlier—there must be an interesting story there). But the thing that you notice right away when you enter the McNay is that its collections and exhibitions are, well, relevant, in that they address and include the people and the artists of West Texas.

From the parking lot, visitors walk past outdoor sculpture-- most prominently, Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, a popular site for wedding and engagement pictures--to enter the museum’s modern addition. Here, contemporary (as in, larger-scaled) work can be shown, in a series of boxy, high-ceilinged white galleries. This new building was completed in 2008 and added some 45,000 square feet to the museum as well a sculpture gallery and garden, a lecture hall, and classrooms in which the McNay conducts many educational programs.

When I was there in late December, the main exhibition featured the work of Chuck Ramirez, a beloved San Antonio artist/ photographer/ designer who died in 2010 in a bike accident. A sprawling show of photographs (he started his career doing commercial work for a local supermarket chain, H-E-B) opened with a flotilla of nine eccentric Christmas trees Ramirez had made for artist, collector and philanthropist Linda Pace, founder of the internationally-renowned local residency Artpace (http://www.artpace.org/) and Ramirez’ friend.

Plenty of visitors wandered through the rooms, examining the striking pictures; some featured single objects, while others documented the contents of purses or trash bags and hospital flower arrangements—all photographed against empty white backdrops.

There were opportunities to interact with some pieces. The labels were clearly written, both accessible and smart.

Along the side of the building, a long gallery features sculpture. Many works are by the usual (Famous Artist) suspects, but most are well-chosen pieces that are worth a close look.

A beautiful staircase at the far end of the building leads down to a lower level that includes the lecture hall, galleries of tabletop sculptures (19th and 20th century bronzes), and, when I was there, a show of politically-oriented prints by Francisco Goya, Gabriel Orozco and Ben Shahn. The choice of images seemed to be extremely apposite in these times.

Back upstairs, I wandered past the centrally-located (and rather generic) museum gift shop and into the house itself. Another small show, titled 'Transnational: Migration, Memory and Home,'included a nearly thirty year old painting by Bay Area artist Hung Liu.

In the end, the exhibition/area in which I spent the most time was “Artmatters 17: Mi McNay es Su McNay,” most likely a play on the hospitable expression 'mi casa es su casa.' Described as “immersing visitors in a domestic setting that blurs the lines between art and life” (the building WAS a house, after all), a series of small rooms present a range of well-chosen works dating from the 18th century to the present. The lighthearted wall text, written in the first person, suggests that a hostess--the founder herself?—is welcoming you to a party. The real occasion for this show, though, is to welcome the collection of San Antonio native John M. Parker Jr. to the museum, including some 160 pieces, the majority of which are Minimal or Conceptual. It’s a gift well worth celebrating.

In another room-- clearly the bedroom, in this domestic fantasy--a Minimal couch/ bed designed by Donald Judd (who knew?)keeps company with sweater-y wall pieces by Wurm, a giant pair of foam boots by Swiss artist Donald Oates and one of Lesley Dill’s oversized, text-covered suits.

Some pieces are part of the McNay’s collection, but many came from Parker. Their intermingling suggests both that the museum is an appropriate new home for these things, and that the addition will be transformative for its holdings of this kind of art. The mixture of old and new is heady and the presentation, entrancing.

From there, a door leads out to the courtyard, where one or two lonely koi hide in a pond out of which peculiar, intermittent spurts of water jet into the air: a strange water feature, no doubt artist-designed, but it grows on you. Beautiful plants and colorful tile work make the space pleasant. In December, it is difficult to imagine what it’s like in the midst of San Antonio’s blistering summer heat, but it must be an oasis. The galleries continue on the other side of the house.

In the library itself, there was yet another small exhibition-- 'Stage Frights: Madness, Monsters, Mayhem,'of scenery and costume designs for theatre. Like the Tim Burton show,it had been put together from the McNay’s own collections. Nearby, in several of the mansion’s rooms repurposed as galleries, an impressive collection of modern art included a heart-stoppingly lovely Matisse, and so much more.

But it was time to go.

Parts of the McNay are in the process of renovation. Should I return, I hope to get to see them, and more of the 20,000 items in the collection. I also sincerely hope that the museum spruces up its website and its web archives, for all of those interested in their holdings. But I often wish that kind of thing, even as I realize that there is just so much money and time, institutionally-speaking. And clearly, the McNay is busy with its main job: putting on shows. There are eight this spring, both continuing an exploration of the very timely issues of race and identity and celebrating San Antonio’s 300th anniversary. The current ‘blockbuster’ is “30 Americans,” pieces by contemporary African- American artists selected from the Rubell collection in Miami. This is clearly a very popular traveling show; it has been in the road since its debut in Florida a decade ago, with four more stops scheduled after Texas, for a total of 16 appearances—all, at small regional museums.

The McNay complements “30 Americans” with “Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African-American Art,” largely drawn from the holdings of local African-American collectors Dr. Harmon and Harriet Kelley. As McNay curator Rene Barilleaux told a local journalist, “The Rubell collection has been touring around the country, but never has it been positioned within a 100-year trajectory of African-American experiences reflected in the arts.”[2]

But that’s not all. There is also a smaller show of the work of four Texas artists-- Xavier Gilmore (San Antonio), Rafael Gutierrez (San Antonio), Calvin Pressley (Philadelphia/San Antonio), and Deborah Roberts (Austin). This, too, is about identity and race, from the perspective of young artists of color in and around San Antonio.Coincidentally, Roberts has a wonderful solo show of collages in San Francisco at Jenkins Johnson Gallery (2/1-3/17/2018). It’s a small, small art world.

If I lived nearby, I’d visit the McNay often, as I do Oakland's somewhat more financially challenged regional museum. I admit to envy. Not to make too broad a generalization, but seems like Texas institutions (and collectors) have both deep loyalty and deep pockets.

And, finally: as visits to smaller museums like the McNay reveal, culture is everywhere. Take a field trip, and find out for yourself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Koogler_McNay

[2] https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article/San-Antonio-couple-s-art-collection-at-heart-of-12544634.php

Oh, really?- Cummings seems to say, as she invites visitors to enter through a portal of assertively fake stone. Plunged into darkness in a high-ceilinged space, the first thing you notice is that it’s both black and shiny all over, a little like a dream-version of being under water. Every surface is reflective: black Plexiglas walls and a black vinyl floor, soft and slightly squishy, weirdly tender underfoot.

In this ‘70s low-budget-sci-fi-movie version of a cave, a video projection plays continuously on one of the walls. There are swimming schools of fish and spinning minerals; crystals, becoming their own reflections, invoking all things natural and sparkly as they segue into a winter scene of grasses in snow. You hear the sound of footsteps on frozen ground… of snowmelt, swelling a dark, fast stream. The sound of water, of music, of water.

Silvery beanbag boulders offer a place to sit while watching the shifting video scenery. If you’re patient at all, you view the loop in its faintly-hallucinogenic entirety, and, when ready, pass through another narrow door into a disco the size of a moderate closet, its surfaces covered with crinkled Mylar.

Almost invisibly, a soft black netting stretches over it all; reaching out to touch the shine, fingers encounter instead the texture of the netting. Noli me tangere. It’s sexy and it’s strange.Turning back to look at the sparkling video one more time, you notice a figure in the frozen landscape-- just for an instant-- as black water rushes through icicle teeth. Music, and those spinning crystals return. Is it Art, or Science? Nature or Culture? And really, what’s the difference?

Enter the final tiny room: wainscoting, wallpaper, then rough wood walls. Not a miner’s shack… maybe something a bit sadder or stranger: an abandoned homestead, or a prettier version of the Unabomber’s cabin. Now look up.

Fairy light filters through the tiny holes of old metal colanders and graters that line the ceiling above you, making them twinkle like a thousand stars in a frontier/disco sky. Look! There’s even an old teakettle, seemingly pierced by dozens of bullets, leaking the glow.

And there, on a nearby wall, an artfully antique-looking wanted poster/broadside/ playbill gives some clues about this place-- in the form of elaborate credits and thanks for all the assistance the artist received during what must have been a long gestation, execution and installation. It takes a village, this seems to say.

The text also exhorts visitors to remember that “Every Town is a Ghost Town if you live there long enough.” Out on the frontier—whatever frontier that might be, whether urban or rural-- you can reinvent yourself repeatedly, but you carry your mental landscape with you wherever you go. There is less distance or difference between worlds than we have thought or understood. There are ghosts, everywhere, and we might as well get used to it.

I’ve visited Transdimensional Ghost Town Discotheque several times since it first appeared some eighteen months ago. I avoided reading the label text on the wall outside the piece (which, in any case, gives little away, and consists mostly of questions and poetic disquisition), or the press release, or in fact anything at all about the work-- until I felt pretty sure that I had figured out what might be going on. As peculiar as this seems for a self-identified Art Explainer, my motivation was simply this: the experience being offered here is rarely available (outside of films, which, being only visual and aural, are a poor substitute for complete immersion). Ann Hamilton’s epic installations offer this kind of thrill. That Cummings figured out how to make a compact space like this so rich makes it a genuine marvel.

I wanted to be able to just have the experience, without the interpolation of words, critical or otherwise—an opportunity which I have now (regrettably) taken away from you. But there’s more to this place than these few sentences. Plenty more, for anyone who has the time or inclination to see for themselves. Frankly, the pictures are terrible. Drop by, and try to parse what the relationship might be between the sky full of stars that Cummings saw every night of her rural childhood, and the disco ball/sequin-bedecked queer aesthetic she has come to know from her life here in the city. Between the shining, swirling schools of silver fish, and all that black vinyl and gleaming silver Mylar. Between camping… and campy.

_____________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________

1. From "Notes on 'Camp'", first published in 1964 in the Partisan Review, republished in Sontag's first collection of essays Against Interpretation in 1966.

Some rounded shapes, strung on more strands of soft, kinky hair (Unidentified Grieving Objects) are the size of a head of finely frizzed curls. Rendered in black, they hover before a spot-lit wall, casting shadows as dramatic as their own suspended forms. In platinum-blonde-white, a line of them hangs near the wall emblazoned with title of the show: “When and where I enter,” excerpted by the artist, Angela Hennessy, from the words of black scholar and activist Anna Julia Cooper:

Only the black woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'

The words seem to Red to talk about a time and place dreamed of but not yet entered, for anyone other than certain (mostly white) men. Except, she thinks, in this dark, church-like place, where the words have a tingling power,conferred on the objects as well.

As time slips by, the light cast through the high front windows slides deeper in the room. It seems whiter than the nearby frizzy puffs; whiter, even, than the words on the wall. But nothing seems as black as the twists and braids that form a ring, a portal, a gate—a massive Mourning Wreath of hair, mounted on a steel pole and standing in the middle of the grey concrete floor. She remembers seeing Victorian jewelry plaited from the hair of lost loved ones, intricately woven and braided like these cascades of gleaming strands. But this is no delicate pendant, no brooch. Its immensity demands attention and respect.

Peering through its circle, she can see something more. In an alcove in the back, a low rounded form sits directly on the floor.

Wider than outstretched arms, its surface is wrapped with braids that sink, as if sucked in, into a central void. That hole reminds her of the way spinning water drops in the middle of a draining pool—on its way out, or maybe-- in. Stately, elegant, radiating power, Black Hole’s blackness soaks up the light, giving nothing back.

Does this place: with its industrial ambience, its matte black walls--help make this art’s meaning? She stops to think. She remembers a room she saw long ago at SFMOMA, in its former home, the old beaux-arts building on Van Ness.

Near the middle of the room, a single patch of dead white powder (Chalk? Clay? Cocaine? No, just flour) covered much of one couch, like a cartoon spotlight. Visitors, getting just a little too close, had abraded the edges of the spill, leaving prints from the toes of their shoes.

In photographs, the room looks brightly lit. She thinks that was for pictures, and remembers it as quite a bit darker. Not as deep in shadow as the place she is now, but still pleasantly twilit, the purple crepuscular in the corners, the gold gleaming faintly. But she also remembers thinking that, without those walls, the objects would have had a much harder job of telling the story they wanted to tell. It was all or nothing.

The hair, the wire, the recumbent chairs needed a place to be together. A place that was not the art world, as it was constituted then, or twenty years earlier, when Hammons had first started using hair-- or even now, in 2017, the era of uncertainty in which Hennessy has chosen to paint her walls black. A world still unsafe, still with different rules for everyone except (white) men.

Do all fairy tales begin and end the same bleak way? Red closes her eyes. The rooms—one real, the other, remembered, both fade to black…

_____________________________________________________

She's at another show. Once upon a time (I could write this phrase fifty times and never get tired of it), the building that houses this gallery was a Masonic temple, and the maple floors warm the light that comes in through windows high and low. Everything looks good, Red thinks, in this honeyed, pleasant space. The dealer and her family live here, around the art she shows and sells, making it possible for visitors to imagine the work in their own domestic space.

Their names are poetic; some, like Rotifer or Radiolaria, allude to the microscopic marine life forms beloved of the natural scientist Ernst Haeckel, who believed in the unity of all living things.

There are hollow bodies with slender waists (Strobe, Conjoined); many-petaled flowers (Ganoderma), and vase-like enclosures (Tunicate, Vortex). They are, in other words, everything that, traditionally, sculpture is not: organic, delicate, made of wire and paper rather than steel or stone. Of course, those sculptural traditions have been eroded by a century of experimentation, but Mintz’s current works are still gendered by association.

Like Hennessy’s circular holes and portals, these are either all about sex, or not at all, depending on what one wants or needs to see.

Back out in the world, night has fallen. She walks the streets through pools of light, from white to black to white again, threading her way through a minefield of ideas. Both of these spaces: alternative and commercial;city and suburban,are frames for the objects encountered there. Both, she thinks, represent a way of being in the world, an attitude towards both art and life. And both, interestingly, are run by women. She stops, puts down her ever-present basket (yes, this is still a fairy tale) and checks the internet on her phone. The gallery in a temple represents ten women and three men, the opposite of the usual gender ratio. All make exquisite images and objects, often highly-detailed and crafted. She taps some more keys. The alternative space pays a stipend to all the artists who show there. In the past year, many of the exhibitions and events held there have addressed issues of race and politics. Not all the art presented is beautiful. It has other jobs to do.

The color of death is white in some cultures. Black can stand for mystery, power, authority. The color of death is black in some cultures. White--threateningly,ominously unmysterious, holds onto power and authority. She walks, she thinks. The basket is heavy. She’d really like to leave it beneath a street light, but someone would surely call the bomb squad. There’s nothing in it but words, since that’s her job—she’s the Village Explainer. She sighs, hoping that everyone will understand her tale, as she wanders off into the quiet dark.

In homage to Lynn Tillman.

*****

Angela Hennessy: Where and when I enter, Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco CA, 10/6-12/2/2017
Davd Hammons: New Work, SFMOMA, 1994
Nancy Mintz: Field Notes, Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley CA, 9/9-10/28/2017

All photographs of Angela Hennessy and Nancy Mintz's work, with the exception of Ganoderma, are by the author. Pictures of David Hammons New Work exhibition are courtesy of SFMOMA, SF CA. Thanks to the CCA Wattis Institute for information on Hammons, an elusive subject.

The sight of a woman’s buttocks is entirely unsurprising in an art museum. A half-turned haunch—nacreous, white-- just belongs, experienced as part of a vista of paintings and objects perched on pedestals.

This alone could be why Sarah Lucas’s sculptures at the Legion of Honor are so startling: because, interspersed among the many bronze and marble figures, they shouldn’t be. Except, well, for the cigarette that protrudes casually from the butt crack of more than one of Lucas’s fragmentary women.

Then there’s the cluster of saggy breasts like a mound of stacked melons that substitutes for another figure’s torso (Titti Doris, 2017), or the giant phallus sprouting from a seemingly-female lap, like a Pietà gone profoundly wrong.

Sprawled on crappy chairs or home appliances, these truncated bits of bodies just stop you in your tracks, not knowing whether you’re supposed to laugh, weep, or be enraged. Or, possibly,all three. Those familiar with Lucas’s contribution to the 2015 Venice Biennale will see a strong familial resemblance between that work and the artist’s provocative pieces interpolated here and there into the Legion’s collection of historic European art,punctuating its beautiful rooms of unchallenging, enjoyable objects and images with punkish glee. The museum is known, to a certain extent, for offering a certain kind of visitor experience. Not to that many visitors, maybe, but a gentle stream of tourists and locals come ready for an engagement with the known. For now, however, the first thing encountered by anyone who comes through the doors is a plaster body from toes to waist, cigarette inserted between its cheeks, sprawled like a female Dying Gaul on a massive chest freezer.

Everything seems to be directing our gaze towards the massive Rodin work in the alcove at the rear. Except, well, it isn’t. Instead, the boots—kinky, peculiar, funny, obstreperously bawdy-- demand attention, surrounded by the ring of spot-lit toilets. Twisted into various dramatic (dare I say, Rodinesque) poses, these gleaming ‘thrones’ seemingly allude to the relationship between nourishment and excretion, birth and death, possibly the domestic purgatory in which women have historically been confined, and-- toilets having been a recurring Lucas theme for more than twenty years—“self-destructive urges and abusive attitudes towards women’s bodies.[1]” They are also a pointedly funny acknowledgment of the influence and importance of Duchamp’s urinal, a work which dates from 1917 as well.

Seen in the dual contexts of the physical setting of the Legion's palatial architecture and the classical good looks of its collection,Lucas’s work becomes a surprisingly effective bridge between past and present, building on nineteenth and twentieth century notions of the avant-garde even as it points towards the future. It asks the question, what can sculpture be now? Who owns the female body? And how will all of these pieces be understood, in another hundred years?

One is of a grappling couple; others are of fragments of bodies that resemble Lucas’ truncated forms. Their startling modernity suggests how alive the galleries of the Legion actually are, even when there are no (equally) sexy contemporary works present.

And this, really, may be part of what’s behind an exhibition like this. Artist’s interventions into traditional museums, either as curators or exhibitors, have become relatively commonplace,but they do get attention. As someone who has now been to the Legion four times in 2017, first to see the Urs Fischer show and then Lucas’s, I have to admit to the effectiveness of this strategy. That’s four times more than I have gone there in the entire preceding decade, since many of the museum’s special exhibitions have been devoted to increasingly small corners of ever-popular Impressionism (“Monet: The Early Years” was followed by “Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade,” for example) by which I have not been sufficiently compelled to make the lengthy trip there. After all, it’s not like I get paid to write about art.

Since Hollein’s appointment as Director of both the De Young and the Legion of Honor in 2016, a number of very interesting things have happened. There have been several significant announcements, including one of a contemporary arts directive, building exhibitions and collections in that area. There has been a major purchase of 62 works by African American artists from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, expanding and adding important diversity to the De Young’s collection of American art. Another press release signals a deepening of the Legion’s commitment to significant Old Master projects—shows devoted to the Pre-Raphaelites and their sources of inspiration (Rafael! Fra Angelico! Botticelli!) and to Peter Paul Rubens.

For now, I’m eagerly anticipating the final Rodin centenary exhibition, opening in October, which will feature the paintings of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. Many of the works in this show are coming to the US for the first time. Visitors to the Legion will also be able to attend Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World, a show of reproductions of Greek and Roman sculpture that have been painted with the vivid hues with which such objects were originally decorated. (I am hoping for a version of The Dying Gaul.) First seen in Germany in 2003, Gods in Color has traveled all over the world; this will be its twenty-third venue.

As harmless as such a show sounds, Gods in Color could have its controversial moments. A classics scholar has recently received violent threats in response to her articles about the bright colors used by the ancients. Writing that white Supremacist groups have used classical statuary “as a symbol of white male superiority,” Professor Sarah Bond has suggested that polychromy more accurately represents the vast range of skin colors of the ancient world.

As Bond puts it, the equation of white marble with beauty has created a false impression of racial purity—one which needs to be unlearned. Similarly, perhaps, the presence of Lucas’s cheeky, bawdy figures at the Legion is a reminder that the naked female body does not belong to museumgoers.

Both of these situations tell us that history (and that does include art history!) is fiction, written by those in control. I am thankful that artists, curators, and historians can— and do—rewrite the narrative, one show at a time.

[1] “The Old in Out: Sarah Lucas in the Tate collection,” http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lucas-the-old-in-out-t07513

[2] Plaster and bronze casts of Rodin’s Thinker are almost too numerous to count, but there are at least 28 full-sized authenticated examples in collections all over the world.

The Hilberts began collecting ‘California Scene’ painting some 25 years ago, eventually acquiring over a thousand watercolors and oils that date mostly from the 1930s through the ‘70s. These are not gauzy post-Impressionist landscapes or (merely) pretty pictures, but visual records of social history: Breughelesque narrative featuring cars and buildings, factories and freeways; seedy city streets and homely country roads.

Even when the landscape is the primary feature, people are never far away.

To be honest, it’s hard to tell where one
show ends and another begins, with the exception of the Disney art. The coherence of the collection as a whole is, after all, its defining characteristic.

Why were so many artists living in California, at a time when there were far fewer people here than there are today? The movies, of course. During the Depression, the Disney studios were a magnet, offering good jobs working on various aspects of design and production. Many of the painters in the Hilbert collection were trained at the Chouinard Art Institute, the school that served as a breeding ground for Disney animators and later became the Disney-supported California Institute of the Arts.

Mary Blair had many different roles at Disney—as an animator, a concept designer for attractions at Disneyland, and a color designer.

These two and many other artists in the Hilbert’s collection were Disney employees, working on their own stuff on weekends. Some are big names in ‘California art,’ according to the museum’s website—including Dike, Rex Brandt and Millard Sheets. There are some women as well, among them Joan Irving,Blair and Ruth Peabody.

Many artists—Sheets, Emil Kosa Jr., Milford Zornes, and Irving -- were also members of the California Watercolor Society, and the skillfulness of their work in that (all but lost) medium is marvelous. Oils, though less plentiful, are also executed with brio and great brushwork.

These include Edouard Vysekal’s Intramovement, showing the busy interior of the Boos Brothers Cafeteria in downtown LA. Painted in 1918, it’s one of the oldest pictures in the collection.

A railroad station by Millard Sheets (seen in the photo of the interior of the current galleries, above),said to be the Hilbert’s best-known work,is certainly striking in an Edward Hopper sort of way.But I liked Sheets’ strange, moody composition Abandoned even more.

A prodigy who won prizes for his watercolors while still in his teens, Sheets later became a hugely influential teacher at schools throughout southern California and an important designer of murals, mosaics and even buildings all over the country.

The Scottish Rite Temple in LA that presently houses the Marciano Art Collection is graced by several Sheets murals, inside and out.

And a San Francisco Public Library Branch hosts this astonishing mural, dated 1977.